"Jerry Pournelle - Houses of the Kzinti" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pournelle Jerry)

swelling as always during a
battle alert, and he had time to wonder why Herrera
was in such a hurry before
the Weasel took her fatal hit amidships.
An energy beam does not always sound like a
thunderclap from inside the stricken
vessel. This one sent a faint crackling down the
length of the Weasel's hull,
like the rustle of pre-space parchment crushed in a
man's hand. Sequestered
alone in a two-man cabin near the ship's aft galley,
Locklear saw his bunk leap
toward him, the inertia of his own body wrenching his
grip from his handhold
near the door. He did not have time to consider the
implications of a blow
powerful enough to send a twelve-hundred-ton
Privateer-class patrol ship
tumbling like a pinwheel, nor the fact that the blow
itself was the reaction
from most of the Weasel's air, exhausting to space in
explosive decompression.
And because his cabin had no external viewport, he
could not see the scatter of
human bodies into the void. The last thing he saw was
the underside of his bunk,
and the metal brace that caught him above the left
cheekbone. Then he knew only
a mild curiosity: wondering why he heard something
like the steady sound of a
thin whistle underwater, and why that yellow flash in
his head was followed by
an infrared darkness crammed with pain.
***
It was the pain that brought him awake; that, and the
sound of loud static. No,
more like the zaps of an arc welder in the hands of a
novice-or like a catfight.
And then he turned a blurred mental page and knew it,
the way a Rorschach blot
suddenly becomes a face half-forgotten but always
feared. So it did not surprise
him, when he opened his eyes, to see two huge kzinti
standing over him.
To a man like Herrera they would merely have been
massive. To Locklear, a man of
less than average height, they were enormous; nearly
half again his height. The
broadest kzin, with the notched right ear and the
black horizontal furmark like